“The way some people ruin important things for petty reasons is something I could never understand in all my life.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden

In the end, after the sixth day of exhibition matches, the forces from Caroma and Levain ended with an overall draw. A win and a loss for each side on the final day cemented the draw in place, although there were murmurs that the Levain troops on the final match had not done as well as they should have. Some claimed that the higher-ups told them to lose so the Caromans could save some face with an overall draw rather than eating a loss.

Reinhardt could vouch for that rumor, given that he was around when Estelle gave the order, but kept his mouth shut. He personally thought better of the Caroman generals, but there was no telling if the officials behind them wouldn’t seize on the loss to make things difficult for them out of pettiness or other base reasons. It was something they decided was better avoided at all costs.

The seventh and final day of the exhibition was preserved to allow the marksmen and skirmishers from the two places to show what they could do. A massive target range was set up on the plains where the mock battles were held on the previous days, and in the morning, the best javelin throwers from both Caroma and Levain competed on range, accuracy, and power.

This time, the match was one-sided. Unlike the small-unit battles, where the Levain militia benefited greatly from the teachings of the mercenaries who specialized in such battles, experience and skill were all that mattered. The Caromans had far more experienced javelineers from Caeropa – whose skirmishers relied on javelins – than the Levain militia had, and thoroughly dominated the event.

There were still one member from the Levain militia and two from the Free Lances in the top ten, but the rest of the spots – including the top four – were dominated by the Caromans.

However, that domination was flipped upon its head when they competed on closer-ranged use of throwing weapons like axes and daggers, which were typically used opportunistically and while on the move. There it was the mercenaries that dominated, as many amongst their numbers were particularly skilled with those types of weapons.

Particularly eye-turning was Ayrie’s performance, as the young quarter-elven girl lightly flitted through the course like she was taking a stroll. Her hands casually flicked from time to time, and a dagger would be accurately embedded in whichever target had just shown itself. The casual ease of her performance – even if it wasn’t the best – along with her young age made many pay attention to her.

After they took a break for lunch at noon, the friendly competition continued, and this time, the archers from both nations finally had their chance to perform.

Caroma was known to possess many strong archers, most of which came from the Oiloman half of the nation. Many of those veteran archers grew up poor and regularly hunted in the forests just to feed their families, and they kept honing their archery skills in the years that followed. Most of them were large in stature, with strong bodies, and each wielded a longbow taller than themselves.

Out of the thirty thousand strong army from Caroma, one-sixth of them were archers, which directly told the value the Caromans placed on these marksmen. Where most archers deployed in war rarely managed good accuracy past two to three hundred paces, the Caroman archers directly competed at a range of five hundred paces and still maintained high accuracy.

Normally arrows at such a distance would have lost a good deal of its momentum and rendered mostly harmless against most targets with half-decent armor. The Caromans used massive longbows that had draw weights of at least sixty kilograms each, however, with heavier arrows to match, so their arrows still had enough power to pierce through chainmail at that distance.

As if to prove that point, the compacted straw targets used for the competition were clad in a layer of chainmail.

Compared to them, Levain lacked such a strong tradition of archery, and barely had veteran archers who could compete. It didn’t help that most of their archers – which weren’t that many, as only around a couple thousand people in the first batch were archers – trained with the mercenaries for rapid shooting at closer ranges rather than long-distance shots.

The competition was thus dominated by the Oiloman archers – most of them grizzled, muscular, middle-aged men and women who had backs that looked as if they were carved out of stone – who fired arrows that pierced cleanly through the chainmail on the targets even at five hundred paces away. Some even fired shots so powerful that the arrow poked out through the other side of the target.

A few of the best went even further and hit similar targets stationed as far as six to seven hundred paces away, and still struck with enough force to pierce through chainmail. In contrast, even the best archers from Levain barely managed such a feat at four hundred paces. As such, it wasn’t even a close match at all.

Part of the reason was because the Caromans had more experienced archers, true, but another part of the reason was a more natural one. Other than those who had a background as a hunter or the likes, there were few amongst the militia who signed up as an archer. Amongst those, most were smaller in stature than the Caromans they were matched up against, and as such couldn’t handle bows that were as heavy. It was only natural for them to perform worse when they had less experience and were using lighter bows to boot.

The one-sided contest lasted for a good while, with the Caromans dominating the leaderboard, until in the last batch of contestants, three representatives from the Free Lances stepped up.

Reinhardt had directly sent Salicia, Alva, and Branka to participate.